timeimmortal

Except this one, that is.

I had a wonderfully relaxing weekend, but it’s been non-stop action all day long, so unfortunately I haven’t had time for blogging. Rest assured that there will be fresh content soon, though — in particular, I’ve just seen the latest episode of BSG, and…well…there’s the omnipresent issue of human rights commissions to add more coverage to.

Like my joke about being Lutheran, HRC discussion never gets old!

Islamist blogger Shaukat Khawja’s website — RehmatPedia — seems to be offline in a rather permanent way.

Let’s see if it lasts.

Wordpress.com blogger Lorelle wonders why more people aren’t concerned about Brazil’s banning of the Wordpress.com domain on account of a single blogger there posting an embedded video in a blog post showing a couple having sex.

I think bloggers around the world have become apathetic. Lazy. Uninspired. Dumbed down. Honestly. When the term echo chamber was coined, it was a good label for all the regurgitation of content spread all over the web, drowning individual voices. Self-interest blogging is pervasive. What happened to altruism and using the blog publishing platform to support freedom of speech and bloggers around the world?

What happened to us? Why am I not seeing protests and opinions on this issue all over the web? Why isn’t the banning of three million WordPress.com blogs a big deal? Why aren’t we talking about this instead of the latest iPhone gizmo and useless SEO techniques? Why didn’t people get angry and protest loudly when WordPress.com blogs were banned in Turkey, China, and other countries? WordPress.com continues to be banned in places - why aren’t we talking about this?

Have we really become desensitized to the plight of other bloggers and the oppression of freedom of speech?

We need to find our indignant righteousness again, fellow bloggers. We need to make our voices matter. Three voices should not have to shout to be heard on behalf of millions of bloggers. I want my WordPress.com blog to be read by those in Brazil, Turkey, China, and everywhere in the world. Don’t you? Why should my blog be penalized because of the actions of one?

People are asking Automattic to take a stand. I’m asking bloggers around the world to take a stand and let their voices be heard when others can’t.

Let not millions of bloggers be blocked and banned for the sake of a couple of idiots. You don’t send an entire city’s population to jail because two people break the law. Maybe the world would be a better place if we did, but that’s another discussion.

I wholeheartedly agree. Oh, that’s not to say that I agree with a blogger who posts sexually explicit material on his website, of course; I find that sort of content unnecessary and immoral. But just as I will defend the right of someone to articulate racist views on a public website, I will defend the right of someone to post sexual material on a website…because the essence of freedom of expression is that we have to accept that people will use the right to express immoral and vile things. Chesterton noted that love means loving the unloveable, or it means nothing at all. Much the same can be said about defending freedom of speech — either we defend the rights of people who say the unsayable, or we may as well not defend the rights of people to say anything.

I disagree with the Brazilian government’s move in its entirety, as surely as I disagree with the actions of the CHRC and other human rights commissions in Canada. And I think bloggers not only should speak out about blatant acts of censorship such as these; I think they have a moral imperative to do so. To refrain from doing so is, in essence, to be a parasite, sucking at the flesh of the great, big internet while doing nothing to foster the fundamental freedoms that is offers, freedoms that are slowly being eroded.

If you’re looking for other bits of artwork I’ve concocted over the years, please check out the media section. Or have a tour through the photo gallery!

Accolades and hate mail go here.

Question:

I think (hope!) most people would consider this offensive:

And certainly, many people consider this offensive:

And yet here’s the rub: for assembling the first picture, I could be condemned as a racist. Had I assembled the second picture, many of my would-be judges would do a sudden about-face and praise me as an avant-garde artist. What is it about the liberal mind that causes it to operate thusly?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Blazing Cat Fur writes:

I do enjoy your blog and your subtle sense of sarcasm;)

That’s the sort of endorsement that makes a guy like me blush. And actually, I’d like to answer and endorsement with an endorsement; Blazing Cat Fur is a great blog to read, I find. Genuinely unapologetic conservatives are not the most common breed. And don’t miss the profile cartoon for the blog — man, I think my friend Paul used that as his MSN name for a month!

Some history:

Time Immortal went live on May 19th of 2004, and was built (at the time) with Macromedia Dreamweaver, using CuteNews for database-free content management.

By August of that year, I’d overhauled the look of the page to be free of frames, but I was still using CuteNews and Dreamweaver. The site languished for a while at that point, before being resurrected on Marth 13th of 2005, this time using the Mambo PHP/MySQL-driven content management system.

And then the site languished again. For a time, the blog was moved over to a subdomain, kennethk.timeimmortal.net. This subdomain actually went live in 2004 at some point (probably July or August), but once it was converted to Mambo (on November 11th of 2004), it became my primary blog.

That lasted until February 7th of 2006, at which point I moved blogging back to the main Time Immortal domain. I was still using Mambo at this point. In the time that had transpired between starting and ending the “kennethk” subdomain, I’d coined the term “backdoor sharia“, participated in the Omar Alghabra blogburst (mistakenly, as it turned out), and made Lost Budgie spew coffee all over his keyboard by remarking that, failing the success of trying to “follow the money”, one should “follow the genitalia” — that was in an article on Islamic suicide bombers wrapping their…uhm…”little jihadists” in aluminum foil prior to self-detonating.

Oh, Lost Budgie…where have you gone?

Anyhow, it wasn’t until January of 2007 that Time Immortal switched over to using the Wordpress content management system, and it will remain with that system for the time being. I keep getting tempted to return to the heady days of Mambo, but I just don’t like how the templates for that system cannot be edited online, in a compartmentalized fashion.

I don’t really know why I just went in to all that detail, but for whatever reason…there it is. I’ve been blogging, in some way or another, for almost four years now, and it’s amazing how much the world has changed even in that short span of time (not always for the better). Four years ago, I’d never even heard of Richard Dawkins — now, I lampoon the man regularly, and many of his contemporaries likewise. The Twin Towers had come down, but the Muhammad cartoons hadn’t yet been published. And I had no idea that human rights commissions were as much of a threat as they were. Oh, and I was still in university.

Still, if those were happier times, these are better times, and I’ve no complaints. The blog continues to grow, and is picking up traffic little by little, which I like. And in the meantime, if a few cool cats like BCF give it a read once in a while, I can say my day is made.

Or at least that my day would be made, except for the fact that my wife already makes my day just by virtue of being next to me when I wake up in the morning.

All of this is a lengthy preamble to something I’ve been thinking about these past weeks: a legal defence fund for people who are vulnerable to being blown over by Kinsellan huffing and puffing. The National Post and Maclean’s don’t need help, but most bloggers do. My observation is that bloggers make defamation law errors very frequently — not that they engage in real defamation often, but that they overreact to the first whiff of gunpowder, and cower before any schmuck with a lawyer’s letter, because they do not know their defences under defamation law, and even if they did, they feel they can’t afford to exercise them.

The point here is not to oppose all defamation suits against bloggers; on occasion, bloggers will be in the wrong, and the right response is to clarify or apologize. Unlike human rights inquisitions — which are always immoral — some complaints against bloggers will have merit. The point, rather, will be to protect bloggers against political attacks masquerading as defamation threats. And that’s what should make this task less enormous than it might sound: if my experience at the Western Standard is any guide, almost all of the work will be merely fending off folks who were angry enough to spend $500 to get a lawyer to draft a demand letter, but have neither the legal case nor the financial resources to file a proper statement of claim, let alone run a trial.

It is my anecdotal observation that the preponderance of such threats come from the domestic left or Islamic fascists, and I imagine that most of the bloggers who will need to be protected will come from the conservative side of the spectrum. But not all; at the magazine, we received demand letters from provincial Tories upset with our coverage of a scandal. And I can think of at least one Liberal blogger whose case — not defamation, but media law nonetheless — I’d love to take.

I would imagine that such a defence fund would be financed partly through the pro bono contributions of defamation lawyers like myself, and partly through dues paid by bloggers into a fund — say, a dollar a month. I imagine it would be a non-profit corporation, overseen by a board scrutinizing revenues and expenses. There would have to be clear rules of when to take an engagement — a written “insurance policy”, including rules to avoid the moral hazard that insurance creates.

Of course, the larger threat is not nuisance defamation suits, for which the legal system has built-in suppresants ranging from the plaintiff’s own legal fees and disbursements to the commendable Canadian rule that the loser pays a portion of the winner’s costs. The larger threat is human rights commissions of the sort that have gone after Mark Steyn, Free Dominion, and others. These are rarer than defamation threats, so far, but they are far more worrisome. I think we need to wait a few more months to see how the current media blowback against commission bullying plays out.

There’s not much more to say that Mr. Levant doesn’t already say here. It’s a good idea, methinks, especially in these uncertain times when the typical response of progressives to reasonable criticism of their ideas is to accuse one of being a bigot.